Fearlessly blogging the intersections of technology, education, and life.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Boxed in and other weekend observations

Over the weekend, we bought a new printer, inspired by my need to print some of my documents out (don't worry, ianqui, I'm trying to keep this to a minimum). We'd been thinking about this for a while since I have a crappy inkjet and Mr. Geeky has a 15-year-old laser printer that we sold plasma to get back when we were in grad school. The printer came in a large box, which Geeky Girl proceeded to lay claim to. First, she took out the styrofoam. Then, she used the cardboard inserts as doors, on which she wrote warnings such as "No Boys Aloud! This is the fashion house!" Then she brought in furnishings--a blanket, a Cooking Light magazine, and a pillow. When it was time for bed last night, she asked if she could sleep in her new home (located in Mr. Geeky's office). We agreed, if she would clean her room in order to make space for her box house. And so, she slept in the box house, snug as bug. (Picture coming soon.)

I mostly spent the weekend organizing, using Zotero to organize my sources (as Steve suggested below). I'd been wanting to try this tool out since I installed it about a week ago, so it worked out well. I like it so far, I think. I especially like the tagging and I've been linking a copy of the file to each entry as well as making notes about how I intend to use the source. I didn't work that much this weekend because I felt much too disorganized. It was seriously making me anxious. I think I'll be starting over a bit on Chapter 3. My work just wasn't coelescing very well. I kept writing and thinking, "I think have an article on this that would support my point, but where is it?" Not a very productive way to work. I don't think I'll have to completely trash what I have now, but there will certainly be some substantial rewriting.

We also spent the weekend as a family playng Word Racer on Yahooligans. Surely, you knew we were this geeky by now? Geeky Boy almost always beat us, but I won a couple of times. Geeky Girl often got bored pretty quickly and would help one of us instead. But it was still fun. Then we all watched BSG in the evenings. We're almost done with season 2.5--one more disc to go. It looks like there'll be a season 3 marathon later in December (yes, I'm planning already).

This will be a short week for all of us. I'm looking forward to a good chunk of down time.